The Mad Italian, Chamblee GA

As longtime readers of my LiveJournal know, I am fascinated by local restaurant chains, especially the ones that never leave their home base. Atlanta has been home to several, and one that has sadly been hit like a freight train during the current recession is the Mad Italian. This wonderful restaurant opened in 1973 on Peachtree Road and claims to have been among the first to serve up New York and Philly-styled sandwiches in the city.

The original location is long gone, but for most of my life, there were two others, in Chamblee and in Smyrna. Around 2005, they opened one in Marietta where a short-lived barbecue restaurant had been (nobody seems to remember the name), and in 2006, a fourth location in Alpharetta moved into a site vacated by a McAlister’s Deli. The Marietta store quickly became my daughter’s favorite restaurant, and it somehow fooled my son into thinking that he liked alfredo sauce. Since everything else from Ragu to sauce packs to the offerings at other restaurants have failed to meet his requirements, he eventually gave up and concluded that what he actually likes is Mad Italian’s alfredo sauce and just quit trying to order it anywhere else.

Then again, who knows what extra ingredients are in Mad Italian’s alfredo recipe? I took a young lady out for supper there late one Saturday evening in 2006 and we had a blast with the staff, since everybody on duty that night was even more baked than my date’s lasagna.

So it didn’t come as a great surprise when the Marietta store closed in 2008, though it was a huge shock when the venerable Smyrna location, where high schoolers used to congregate after Wills High School football games in the eighties, shut down at the same time. Then again, there hasn’t been a Wills High School since 1989 either. Late last year, the Alpharetta store followed them, leaving the Chamblee location as the last man standing in what used to be a northside tradition.

For all my lovin’, Mad Italian’s had a curiously poor reputation among locals for years. Back when Atlanta Cuisine had a messageboard (come on, Tom!), the announcement that the Smyrna and Marietta stores had shuttered had met with really curious glee. Well, sure, any place where the staff can spend even one night visibly stoned stupid can’t say they didn’t have it coming, but I always liked everything on the menu, from the sandwiches (made on very light bread by Cassone Bakeries of New York) to the pasta fagioli soup (tomato-based, with shells, red and white beans) to the incredibly yummy meat sauce. I’m not savvy enough to say whether the pasta itself is any different from anybody else’s, but I really don’t believe I’ve ever had meat sauce as consistently good as Mad Italian’s, despite regular experimentation.

The sandwiches have always been terrific, too. I really have not ordered their cheesesteak often enough. There are better in the region, but any of their six-inch sandwiches, served with a small salad and a bowl of spaghetti, will give you a truly satisfying meal. How the Mad Italian has suffered while that Artuzzi’s chain is still around utterly baffles me.

My daughter has been pestering me for some time to revisit past triumphs, and since she’s been pretty good lately, I agreed to indulge her. This past Saturday, she and I took a long drive out for lunch here with our frequent dining partner David, whose restaurant choices are consistently good. I believe his family went to the Smyrna location many times in the past, but got out of the habit ages back. Marie wasn’t with us this trip; she and her brother went to Athens to raid that deli I was talking about the other day.

I don’t have a lot more to say about the trip. It’s a huge, aggravating shame that the Mad Italian’s fortunes have dipped so badly lately, and that a nearly forty years-old enterprise feels like it’s on its last legs, but it’s still a perfectly reliable place for a really decent sandwich or a big bowl of pasta with good sauce.

On the other hand, well, since Marie moved in, we’ve had her unbelievably good sauce recipes with a variety of meats and spices and, to be bluntly honest, as good as Mad Italian’s spaghetti with meat sauce is, I can’t swear that I’ve missed it. It’s a place that does everything pretty well, but there’s not one thing on the menu that I can’t get better someplace else. And honestly, when your nostalgia for a place’s fun history is louder than your present-day enthusiasm, and chuckling about stoned servers is more fun than the meal in front of you, it may be the ultimate sign that you’ve moved on.

Marietta Fish Market, Marietta GA

One of Marietta’s local heroes is Gus Tselios, a fellow whose group owns four restaurants in the area. The world-famous Marietta Diner is the flagship of his empire, and the others are Pasta Bella, the Cherokee Cattle Company and the Marietta Fish Market, which opened in December 2008. There’s absolutely no way that anybody in Atlanta can even be a quasi-serious foodie and not come to Cobb County to try out at least one of these places.

The basic gist of the restaurants is family dining, with an emphasis on freaking enormous portions. You can usually expect to spend $20 a head here, but your Jackson will buy you one supper and at least one leftover lunch. All four restaurants have menus so thick that they’ll probably stop a bullet, but the secret is simple: order from the specials. On the inside front cover of each menu, there’s an inserted page typed up that day. Unless you’re really in the mood for a standard, as I admittedly often am, you just want to focus on the one page. What Tselios and his chefs have concocted for that page will probably knock you on your backside.

All four restaurants are usually pretty packed – there’s a wait at the Diner 24/7 – but we decided to brave the Fish Market Friday night. Even at 8 pm there was a forty minute wait, but Marie’s brother was in town, and, observing Lent, wanted fish for supper. Frankly, Atlanta does not have very many seafood restaurants worth visiting, so our options were, flatly, accept a long wait or brave the drive-thru at Captain D’s. The Fish Market, happily, is just five minutes up the road and worth the wait.

Friday evening, I was in the mood for a standard – shrimp and scallops. The Fish Market has a “lighter appetite” section on their menu, where you get about half the food for two-thirds of the price. It’s not the most economically sensible policy unless you’re just trying to save a couple of bucks, and things admittedly are a little tight. Besides, they still give you so darn much as to provide leftovers for Saturday night. So I had fried baby shrimp and grilled scallops over dirty rice with cole slaw, following some pretty good fried green tomatoes and zucchini fries that we all shared and a Greek salad. Normally, we don’t splurge on appetizers, but Karl was in town, and it’s usually very difficult for Marie and I to resist any kind of fried vegetable. Fried green beans are her particular kryptonite. I don’t know that I’ve had zucchini prepared like this before. A basket is big enough for four, and those are darn tasty.

My plate would have been perfectly satisfactory had Marie not ordered from the specials. She had the red beans and rice with jumbo shrimp, and friends, you’ve never had it this good. The beans are cooked in this unbelievably good sauce, very tangy and sweet. I was pilfering beans and sausage all night just to let that sauce roll around on my tongue. Karl also ordered from the specials, and had a whole red snapper brought out on a huge platter and a bed of sauteed vegetables. He made out just fine, too.

The only member of our group not to be totally satisfied with supper was my daughter, who keeps claiming that she doesn’t actually like seafood despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, and, sighing, got an order of chicken strips from the kids’ menu. To be honest, these weren’t all that great, but they were the biggest chicken strips I’ve ever seen and could clobber your next door neighbor into unconsciousness, and frankly anybody who’d order chicken in the Fish Market probably could stand to be walloped upside the head with one herself. But that’s okay; the next good meal we’d share was one that she requested.

Other blog posts about Marietta Fish Market:

Atlanta Foodies (June 21 2009)
Atlanta Restaurant Blog (July 7 2009)
From My Table (Sep 13 2009)

Two Brothers Barbecue, Ball Ground GA

I was out of town yesterday on business, hoping-to-earn-a-little-extra-money-business, with Randy, who, apart from an unfortunate willingness to eat at those gawdawful Chinese buffets, isn’t at all a bad egg. The road took us north through Ball Ground, a town, they say, which was mostly owned by a miser named Oscar Robinson who died in 2005 with an incredibly complicated estate. Robinson owned most of the buildings in the small town and filled them with rocks. He’d sell them, of course, but that’s what the buildings housed: rock stores. Apparently there are still millions of dollars left unaccounted for, and some of it’s probably holed up in one downtown building or another. The current owners are in no rush to tear down anything or let somebody clear it out, for fear that a big sack of money might be under a staircase or in a wall or something. On the one hand, Robinson didn’t seem to do very much for bringing economic development to Ball Ground, but on the other, he kept the Wal-Marts out of town. Frankly, we all owe that man a beer in heaven.

The road took us to Two Brothers, a place I left in a fit of completely unjustified pique about eight years previously. The interior of the place is done up like a whacking huge tool shed, full of rusty old farm equipment, those glass insulators for power lines that you always see in places like this, and old soda bottles lining the walls. Eight years ago, I had my eye on a bottle of Kickapoo Joy Juice from the late sixties. This was a Ski / Mountain Dew clone made to cash in on the Li’l Abner comic strip, and sold at the (now abandoned) Dogpatch USA theme park, along with shops throughout the region. These days, it’s bottled with a paper label and sold in specialty stores for nerds like me, some of whom like to pretend that they can tell the difference between it and Mountain Dew. Anyway, I like the original bottle, and they wouldn’t sell it to me, and so I walked off in a supposed huff and didn’t come back because they were so “mean.” Plus, they’re in Ball Ground.

Well, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones after eight years, especially when I’m the one who lost out by not eating this great food.

Lunch and supper are served here Thursday through Sunday. You go through cafeteria-style and usually have seven or eight sides to choose, with pickles, onions and chow-chow available by the register. The stew – I’m not picky about stew, I just want to see it available as a side – is a thick one you can eat with a fork, similar to the hash you get in Athens and the Carolinas. They have a mild and a hot tomato-based sauce and they’re pretty conservative with it.

This is a good little place, ready to fill you up for about ten bucks. Admittedly, every time I look at the paper-labeled bottle of Kickapoo on my mantle, it sticks in my craw a little, but I think I can justify stopping by more often than once every eight years. You never know; I might need some rocks.

Chicken Mull, Danielsville GA

One by one, I walked up the chain of command at the Danielsville Volunteer Fire Department until I got to Chief Perry. He’s in his late fifties, a big guy, wearing a yellow apron with his name on it. He told me what the heck I was doing here, and I told him I sure was glad I came. Continue reading “Chicken Mull, Danielsville GA” →